Wi-Fi Wonks Fon Home

Cyrus Farivar
02.09.06

A new service could allow you to share your home internet connection and, in exchange, surf the web for free while on the road.

A Spanish company called Fon (pronounced like "phone") has devised a new way to provide Wi-Fi to local areas. The company announced earlier this week that it was able to obtain nearly $22 million in funding from Silicon Valley juggernauts including Sequoia Capital, Google and Skype.

The company plans to provide three levels of service. The top level, called "Linus" -- named for Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux -- allows those who share their home internet connections to receive free access to other Fon internet hubs around the world. Those net access points are made available by other Fon users who share their connections. Currently, according to Ejovi Nuwere, Fon's U.S. general manager, there are approximately 9,000 worldwide Fon users, all of whom are Linuses.

"Everyone is paying for internet access at home and when they're traveling they're paying for internet access on the road," Nuwere said. "We think that if you pay $40 a month for internet at home that you should have internet access wherever you go. One of the things that we want to do is to bring the public internet to the public."

Nuwere acknowledged that while many American ISPs don't currently permit their customers to share their internet access with the outside world, users should check with their provider to be sure. He cited Speakeasy as an example of a major U.S. ISP that currently allows for the sharing of internet service.

Nuwere added that the company is currently pursuing agreements with ISPs so users would not be violating their ISP contracts if they used Fon's service.

The second and third levels, which are still in development, are known as "Bill" and "Alien," respectively. A Bill (named for Microsoft founder Bill Gates) is someone who is compensated in exchange for sharing his or her home internet access. An Alien is someone who pays to use a Fon access point on a short-term basis. Nuwere added that Fon expects to have Bills and Aliens set up by summer 2006 and to have agreements with more U.S. ISPs.

"In every country, the cost per day (for Aliens) would be the equivalent of a subway token," Nuwere said. "Monthly, it would always be more than what the ISPs are charging." The service is free for Linuses and Bills.

Fon has attracted interest from the A-list digerati -- many of whom serve on the Fon board of advisers, including Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices, former San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor and Wendy Seltzer, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"There's already an existing model that works for free, and fee access for one-off locations," he said. "There's nothing substantially different than what's out there unless they want to be part of a bigger network, and there already are bigger networks. I keep trying to figure out what itch Fon is trying to scratch."